If you want to grow your business, fostering an innovation mindset among your team is one of the most important things you can do. Without a team that aspires to grow, there will be no one to bring your dreams and visions to fruition.
Scaling a business is a mindset. It requires a lot of experimentation, automation, and a data-driven approach. If your team lacks this mindset, your efforts to scale your business will be futile.
Digital marketing guru Alessio Pieroni is an expert on cultivating a mindset of growth in a team. He built up the successful digital marketing agency Scale for Impact and is the author of the new book, Exponential Marketing. Here is an extract from Chapter 8 “Experiment. How to create a testing culture” where he shares 4 commandments for building a growth hacking, out-of-the-box thinking, innovative team.
I often worked with young people who had just graduated from college, which was challenging because it forced me to ask myself questions like: How can I turn these people into contributors of effective ideas for the business that can help the company grow?
The result of my reflections on the subject was the creation of four (+1) commandments that, I believe, should be applied to all phases of a business.
First Commandment
The first commandment says don’t clip anybody’s wings. Always respond to idea proponents with a question. A ‘no’, always keep that in mind, does no good, whereas a question pushes the person who proposed the idea (which might have been brilliant but maybe out of place or unrealizable) to think even deeper; it directs them to figure out for themselves why it wasn’t the right time to propose it.
It is important to make the person who proposes the idea think: it helps them grow. But more often than not, even this is not enough.
Second Commandment
Make other people’s ideas fail.
It sounds like a bad thing but it’s not what it sounds like. By “make others’ ideas fail” I mean that time and resources should be set aside for those who propose ideas, to put them to the test as well.
Yes, even if you might already know that these ideas will almost certainly fail because your experience in the field tells you that. However, it’s important that your team members bang their heads against the failure of an idea they’ve advanced, figuring out for themselves why it doesn’t work.
Third Commandment
The third commandment for growing ideas within the company is training. Do lots of it, do it all the time: the motto “those who don’t train will stop”, always proves itself true.
Courses, conferences, webinars: the more you follow the developments in your industry, the more you learn, the more up-to-date you are.
The training itself is important but if you train and don’t apply what you’ve learned, it serves little purpose. If on the other hand, you use training to generate new ideas, you can not only realize the quality of a certain type of course but you can also have a return on investment (training, in fact) that allows you to grow.
Fourth Commandment
The fourth commandment is used too little in companies. Its principle?
Copy.
Yep. You got that right.
It’s done the same way as with training: consume readings, podcasts, articles, videos. Not only that, go steal ideas from other businesses.
Do you have an e-commerce business and want to get 100 new ideas? Go on a hundred other e-commerce businesses and study them. It’s a process that works with everything: one new article, for example, can spawn at least one new idea for your sustainable growth.
Bonus Commandment
Put these four commandments into practice as much as possible and look at everything as a chance for growth. As I anticipated, the biggest secret is just that these are universal commandments. They apply to any process that can lead to a person’s professional growth.
The fifth commandment – the most important and the one that sums them all up – is this: make people grow.
Natasha Zo is a former journalist from Siberia turned international media relations specialist and communication strategist. She is a founder of a boutique PR agency on a mission to amplify messages of conscious leaders through media. Known for her connector skills, she guided a number of authors to Amazon bestseller status, booked national TV, top-tier media, and over 400 podcast interviews.
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